Because sharing is good for everyone.

  • The Future of Open Source Catholic

    When I started Open Source Catholic in 2009, I was hoping to create a centralized resource for Catholics who were involved in OSS, sharing of ideas, tips and techniques for technology and web use for Catholic organizations, and a forum for Catholic software and app developers.

    I was also employed by the Church at the time, and spent a good deal of time working on the problem of the Catholic Church being far behind tech trends in the wider tech world.

    Times have changed, this site has basically been on...

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  • Church.io OneBody directory and social networking software

    While browsing Hacker News today, I noticed a neat project by Tim Morgan, OneBody. It is described as a “private member portal for churches” that offers “church directory and social networking” for your Church.

    Church.IO Directory Screenshot

    There’s a great discussion in the Hacker News thread (Show HN: OneBody Church Directory software I’ve been hacking on for 7 years), and you can get involved with the project (or just download the software) from Church.IO.

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  • MapTiming - a web app that adds time to maps

    Hi,

    it’s a pity that this forum attracts so little attention, because opportunities for leveraging web technologies in the church are plenty…

    Here’s an announcement of a new app -under development- that may be useful for churches. It’s called MapTiming and the idea is to create a web app where you store information about upcoming events or schedules. You store location information as well as calendar date and time. The events are displayed on a map, and can be filtered based on a selected timeframe. MapTiming shows in a glance...

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  • One of the Best Days of my Life...

    Where to begin? So much has happened; my life has changed. I guess there’s no where better to start than the beginning.

    I became addicted to drugs around the age of 21, and continued to use drugs more and more all the way up to The Night. By that I mean the night I walked into a St. Catherine’s in Morgan Hill, CA. It was Christmas Eve, my family was all gathered at my sister’s in Gilroy for the occasion, and I was sent out to go to the store...

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  • Generic platform for finding catholic

    Hi,

    I have the impression the activity on the forum is quite low, nevertheless I’m going to put forward a question. As you can see in my previous post, I’m working on some ideas to get the church some presence on mobile media.

    My main use case is for a faithful or anyone who’s interested, to find out what’s going on in his neighbourhood. There should be a (web) app that can answer concrete questions like

    • where can I attent mass later today closeby? (may include e.g. funeral masses)
    • which...
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  • When and where can I go to church in the neighbourhood?

    Hi,

    If you ever need to do something with maps, make sure to look at Google Fusion Tables. I’ve used them to create a web app where you can look up on the map where in the neighborhood you can go to mass. You can filter to look for masses that start immediately, that start later today or that take place tomorrow. On clicking a church, you get a view of all scheduled masses.

    Here are some links:

    Code on GitHub: https://github.com/vicmortelmans/masses

    Fusion table: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1JsfBqBIs-A9Buvs-smPqrNn4iBgJ6Ckn7GbONJM

    Website: http://vicmortelmans.github.io/masses/ (you’ll have to...

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  • Are you setting up your parish websites for failure?

    Earlier this year, a study found that religious websites have more malware than porn websites. Unfortunately, this is not too surprising.

    Pornography sites are often run by very profitable media conglomerates, and it’s in their best interests to have reliable, fast websites. Religious websites (like your parish website, or a site for a small nonprofit) are often run on a shoestring budget and maintained by volunteers, if at all.

    In the past, when websites were mostly static pages, and sites were hosted mostly on shared hosting, where the hosting...

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